Where the games come from

Brain Games — the history behind all 87 of them

Almost none of these games were invented by us. Backgammon is five thousand years old, solitaire was played by hand long before a screen existed, and the arcade ones have a date and a cabinet in a bar. They fall into four families, and this page is about where each family came from. For a single game, its own page tells the whole story.

Board

These are the old ones. Backgammon has been played for about five thousand years, chess arrived from India through Persia, draughts and nine men’s morris were scratched into stone floors by people with an afternoon to spend. Nobody owns them, nobody invented them in the sense a company invents a product, and they survived because the rules are short and the games are not. We did not change any of them.

• Backgammon — Ten opponents, from beginner to master. Doubling cube and game analysis. play
• Boxes — Draw a line, close a square, draw again. The obvious move is usually the wrong one — sometimes you have to leave two squares behind. play
• Checkers — Eight by eight, four levels. Captures are compulsory, as they should be. play
• Chess — A full engine, move-by-move analysis and boards worth collecting. play
• Dash — Four pieces round the track. Land on his and he starts again. play
• Dice — Five dice, three rolls, thirteen boxes. Beat the target. play
• Domino — Seven tiles each. Match a number, or draw until you can. play
• Faces — Twenty-four faces, one secret. Ask, narrow down, and say who it is. play
• Flip — Trap a line of his discs between two of yours and they all turn. The corners can never be turned back. play
• Four in a Row — Four in a row against the computer, in three strengths. play
• Heaps — This game is solved, and the answer is one line: write the pile sizes in binary, add the columns without carrying, and if every column comes out even then whoever moves next loses. play
• Master Code — A hidden row of colours. Ten tries, and every answer narrows it down. play
• Mill — Nine pieces each. Three in a line takes one of his away. play
• Row — Drop a piece down a column and make four in a row — upright, flat or slanted. The middle column is worth more than it looks. play
• Rummy — Runs and sets on tiles. Pick what to play, the table rearranges itself. play
• Seeds — Land your last seed in your own store and you play again, so chaining those turns one move into four and that is where the game is won. play
• Span — Join your two sides of the board before the computer joins its own. It cannot end level — that is a theorem, not a house rule — and the computer plays by filling the board at random and counting. play
• Warship — Five ships hidden on a ten by ten sea. Find them before it finds yours. play

Cards

A deck of fifty-two is a machine for making games, and Europe has been feeding it for six hundred years. Solitaire was a way to spend an evening alone long before a screen could deal the cards; scopa and briscola are what two people play in an Italian bar with forty cards and no table to speak of. The shuffle is the whole point: the same game is never the same twice.

• Briscola — The Italian trick-taking classic. Forty cards, one trump suit, sixty points to win. play
• Hold — What changes between the levels is not the dealer’s skill — he has none, he draws to seventeen and stops. play
• Peaks — Every hand here can be won: each one is checked with a solver before it is dealt, so a hand you lose is a hand you lost. play
• Poker — A table of four: you and three others, a thousand dollars each, and it ends when one player has it all. play
• Scopa — Match a card or add up to it, and sweep the table clean. play
• Solitaire — The Klondike you know, drawing one card or three, and the difference between those two is the difference between a puzzle and a gamble. play
• Spider — Eight runs from king to ace. One suit, two suits, four — and nothing else changes, because nothing else needs to. play

Arcade

These have a date and an address. Somebody built a cabinet, put it in a bar, and watched what people did with it. The rules were decided by what made someone put in another coin, which is a harder test than it sounds — a game that is too easy empties the room and one that is too hard empties the pocket. What is left is a shape you can still feel in a phone game today.

• Bauble the puzzle — Shoot balls at the wall. Three of a colour burst — and whatever is left hanging from nothing falls. play
• Blast — Drop a bomb and run. The blast stops at the first wall — so a wall really does shelter you, and you can count the squares before you press. play
• Bounce — A bat, a ball, a wall of bricks. Where you catch it decides where it goes. play
• Bridge — A race up a bridge you build yourself. Run over the red bricks to stack them on your back, then climb: every brick is one more step. The other runners are doing the same. play
• Cascade — Columns of three stones fall. Three of a colour in a line and they go — and what drops can start a chain. play
• Coil — You are a snake that never stops, in a ring full of other snakes. play
• Crown — She walks the runway, you pick the side: lipstick, heels and diamonds make her shine, mud and banana peels do not. From scruffy to queen in one walk. play
• Delve — The rocks are held up by the earth you are digging away, so the game is a question you ask before every step: what is above me, and is there earth still holding it? play
• Drift — A rock you hit does not vanish, it splits in two smaller and faster ones, so each big rock is seven targets and the last ones are the hard part. play
• Flume — A race down a zigzag water slide on a swim ring. Lean into the bends or they throw you in the pool, and on the straights jump off on purpose to land further down. play
• Fork — A sausage, a fork and a row of plates. Hold to wind the fork up, let go, and the sausage has to come down on the next plate flat — land it on its nose and it rolls straight off. play
• Grow — You run and never stop. Green gates add runners to the column behind you, red ones take them away — and a wall only lets through a column tall enough. play
• Gulp — A hole in the middle of the city. Swallow cones and people, grow, then cars, buses and houses. One minute to get big enough. play
• Hop — On the road what moves kills you; on the water the gaps drown you, so you have to be standing on a log, and the log carries you along until it carries you off the edge. play
• Keys — Black tiles slide down four lanes, and each one you tap plays the next note of the tune. Ode to Joy, Für Elise, Jingle Bells: play the whole melody without a wrong note. play
• Lane — The car drives itself and all you do is move it across the road. play
• Macedonia War — Fruit flies up from below and across the screen. Swipe to cut it: the more you take in one stroke, the more it pays. Never touch the bomb — the third one ends the game. play
• Mart — A tiny shop, and nobody else to run it. Pick what grows in the garden, fill the shelves, and get to the till before the queue loses patience. play
• Munch — Eat every dot in the maze while four ghosts chase you. The big dots turn the tables. play
• Pazit Novo — Four-square pieces fall. Fill a row and it disappears. play
• Peek — Things pop out of the holes for a moment. Tap the green ones, leave the spiky red ones alone. play
• Pills — Two-colour pills fall into a bottle with viruses at the bottom. Four of a colour in a line disappear, viruses included — and what is left over falls, so a line can form on its own. play
• Plumb — The water is coming and there is no pipe yet. You lay it, one piece at a time, and you do not get to choose the piece. play
• Rally — Where the ball hits your paddle decides where it goes: the middle sends it straight back, the edges send it away at an angle. play
• Roll — A marble on a track hanging over nothing. Steer it sideways over narrow bridges, around barriers and away from the hammers, and do not roll off the edge. play
• Swap — Trade two neighbouring gems. Three in a line vanish, what is above falls, and that can vanish too. play
• Swarm — Thirty-six creatures come down in steps. One shot at a time, three shelters, three lives. play
• Trail — The game is not avoiding walls, it is building them: every turn you make takes space away from the other one too. play
• Worm — You do not steer it, you turn it: between one swipe and the next it keeps going on its own, and the faster it moves the further it gets before you can change your mind. play
• Y-Type — Five hand-built stages, not five random caves: a shipyard, a battleship hull with a way over and a way under, timed presses, narrow ducts, and the core. play

Puzzle

A puzzle has no opponent, which means it has nowhere to hide. If it is dull you notice at once, because there is nobody else to blame. The good ones are the ones where you can see the whole board and still not see the answer, and where the answer, once you have it, looks obvious. That is a narrow target, and most of these have been aimed at it for decades.

• Alien — One of the crowd is not one of them. play
• Bake — Cupcakes to order: fill the cup, take it out of the oven when it is golden, pipe the right frosting and add exactly the toppings on the ticket. Every step scored by how close you get. play
• Bond — Two columns of emoji, and every one on the left belongs with one on the right: the bee with the honey, the rain with the umbrella. play
• Buzz — A dog, a beehive and one line of ink. Draw a wall with your finger, then let the bees out: for ten seconds they look for every gap you left. play
• Case — Copy the sample onto a blank phone case: pick the colour, spray it on with your finger until it is all covered, and stick every sticker exactly where it sits on the sample. play
• Crates — Push every crate onto a mark. You can only push, never pull — and a crate in a corner is lost. play
• Dusk — Press a light and it flips, with its four neighbours. Turn them all off — the fewest presses it takes is shown. play
• Echo — It plays a colour, you play it back, and the sequence grows by one every time you get it right. play
• Fuse — Swipe and the whole grid slides. Two equal tiles that meet become one of double the value. play
• Glow — Three tools, and each one does one thing. play
• Hush — Find every key in the dark house and get to the door. play
• Jam — Slide the cars out of each other’s way until the red one can leave. Nothing turns, nothing reverses. play
• Link — Join the dots of each colour with a pipe. Connecting them all is not enough: every square has to be used. play
• Mahjong — Clear the board two tiles at a time. Every deal can be solved. play
• Nest — An empty room and a row of furniture that all has to fit. The bed and the wardrobe go against a wall, nothing blocks the door, and at five stars there is barely a square to spare. play
• Pairs — Every shape is on two cards. Find them in as few turns as you can. play
• Park — A full car park and one free space. Drive the red car in with your thumb, reversing if you have to, and stop it inside the lines without touching anything. play
• Pour — Pour the liquid from tube to tube until each one holds a single colour. Always the whole block, never a drop. play
• Pull — Pull a wooden peg and whatever was resting on it falls. play
• Reach — A thief with a very long arm. Draw its path to the diamond with your finger, around walls, laser beams, sleeping dogs and fire, and mind the rope: it only goes so far. play
• Sculpt — A slab of clay on the wheel and a card with a person in a pose. Carve away everything that is not the statue, and do not cut into it: clay you take never comes back. play
• Slide — Numbered tiles and one gap. Half of all arrangements cannot be solved — these are shuffled by playing real moves backwards, so every one can. play
• Sneak — Every guard carries a cone of light in front of them. play
• Spot — A traffic jam, a football match, a crowded beach, a classroom: two pictures that look the same, and a few things that are not. Tap them on either picture. play
• Sudoku — Grids of 9 and 16, in five levels from easy to diabolical. No limit on games. play
• Sums — Digits one to nine. Every run adds up to the number written beside it, and no digit repeats inside a run. play
• Sunsweeper — The numbers say how many suns are next door. Find them all. play
• Tally — The numbers at the edge say how many squares in a row are filled. Work it out, and a picture appears. play
• Ten Ten — Clear the sheet: pair equal digits, or two that add up to ten. play
• Tint — Pick a colour and fill in every piece that carries its number. Nothing to win, no clock, nothing to lose: the sheet is done when it is full. Mandalas, stained glass, flowers and butterflies, a different one every time. play
• Towers — Move the stack one disc at a time, never a bigger disc on a smaller one. Each extra disc doubles the shortest answer. play
• Twist — The two-by-two cube, unfolded flat. Three faces turn, and that is enough. The stars are a measured distance from solved — four turns, eight, twelve — not a guess. play